Sony Music Licensed Its Catalogue to Boomplay in 2019. In December 2024 It Pulled Every Title, Orchard and AWAL Releases Included, Over Royalties Neither Side Will Confirm

On 19 November 2019, Sony Music Entertainment became the third major record company to license its catalogue to Boomplay, Africa’s biggest streaming and download app. Universal Music Group had done it a year earlier. Warner Music Group had done it that March. Sony’s deal put Wizkid, Davido and the Kenyan artist Redsan on the platform alongside Sony’s international roster, across ten African markets, at a time Boomplay said it had crossed 60 million users.

On 9 December 2024, five years and three weeks later, trade reports said Sony had pulled every one of those titles back off Boomplay. Gone with them were releases distributed through Sony’s The Orchard and AWAL divisions, among them Davido’s Timeless, Wizkid’s Made in Lagos, Tems’ Born in the Wild and Lojay’s LV N ATTN. The reported reason was money Boomplay had allegedly stopped paying. Neither company has said so publicly, and neither has said what, if anything, has changed since.

What actually changed hands

Nothing was sold, in either direction, at either end of this story. Sony Music Entertainment has never owned any part of Boomplay. Boomplay has never owned a single Sony recording. What existed between 2019 and, as far as any source checked for this record shows, at least December 2024, was a licence: Boomplay’s right to stream and sell downloads of Sony’s catalogue inside a defined set of African markets, in exchange for royalties on that usage.

A licence of that kind can be switched off without a single master changing hands, because nothing about who owns the recording is in dispute. What was withdrawn in December 2024 was access, not ownership. That distinction matters because a lot of coverage at the time described it loosely as Sony “leaving” Boomplay, language that reads more like an acquisition falling apart than what the sources actually document: a rights holder revoking a distribution right it had granted, over money it says it was not paid.

The licence Boomplay never owned

The 2019 announcement was specific about what was changing hands and where. Boomplay would carry Sony’s roster, including Wizkid, Davido and Redsan, plus Sony’s international catalogue, across Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Sean Watson, then managing director of Sony Music Entertainment Africa, was quoted welcoming the deal; Phil Choi, Boomplay’s director of content and strategy at the time, framed it as the platform completing its set of majors. No financial terms were disclosed then, and none have surfaced since.

That silence on price is consistent across all three major-label deals with Boomplay. Universal’s November 2018 agreement, covering seven countries at launch and expanded to 47 by March 2021, never named a figure either. Warner’s March 2019 deal didn’t. None of the three has ever put a number on what Boomplay pays, or paid, for the right to carry their catalogues, which means any royalty dispute between them was always going to play out as a he-said-she-said rather than a documented breach, because the terms it would be measured against were never public in the first place.

Three majors, one door each, and a different door for everyone else

Universal, Warner and Sony each negotiated with Boomplay one on one. Independent labels did not get that option, or that attention. A month after Sony signed, in December 2019, Boomplay struck a single agreement with Merlin, the collective licensing body that represents more than 20,000 independent labels and distributors worldwide, bringing their catalogues onto the platform in one stroke rather than thousands of separate negotiations. Boomplay’s Phil Choi called it a way to introduce “the world’s largest network of independent labels into Africa.” Merlin’s Charlie Lexton called Boomplay “Africa’s exciting and fast-evolving music market.”

That split, three bilateral major deals and one collective independent deal, is the direct-versus-aggregator structure that runs through almost every streaming market, and it matters here because of AWAL. AWAL built its name as an independent distributor working through exactly that kind of collective access. Sony bought AWAL’s distribution business in 2021, folding a company that once reached Boomplay’s independent lane into Sony’s own direct one. By the time Sony’s catalogue came off Boomplay in December 2024, AWAL-distributed titles came off as part of Sony’s holding, not Merlin’s, a reminder that who represents an artist on a platform like Boomplay can change years after the artist’s own deal was signed, without the artist doing anything at all.

What broke in December 2024

Trade reports on and immediately after 9 December 2024 were consistent on the shape of what happened, even where they could not name a source. Sony’s full catalogue, including Orchard- and AWAL-distributed releases, stopped being available on Boomplay. The Nigerian trade outlet that first reported it named specific casualties beyond the ones already mentioned, including Ruger’s Pandemic EP and Simi’s Lost and Found, and reported that new releases from some of those artists were unavailable too. Multiple reports attributed the withdrawal to accumulated unpaid or late royalties, with sources cited as putting the non-payment at stretching back to at least April 2023, twenty months before the catalogue came down.

One Nigerian label executive, quoted in trade coverage at the time, described labels being “forced to show up at their office to demand it” because of what the executive called a lack of transparency in Boomplay’s reporting. No Boomplay executive was quoted responding to that characterisation. Neither Sony Music Entertainment nor Boomplay issued a statement confirming the withdrawal, its scale, or its cause, in any source checked for this record. The timing sat inside a wider run of bad news for the platform: Boomplay’s long-serving content chief Phil Choi, the same executive quoted celebrating the Sony and Merlin deals five years earlier, had left the company the previous month for Warner Music Group, and separate reports described Boomplay reducing staff across Africa.

What this record does not show

No source read for this record states a figure for what Boomplay owed Sony, The Orchard or AWAL. “Not disclosed” here means exactly that: no document checked contains a number, not that the sum was small. Some reporting at the time said other, unnamed distributors and aggregators were also withholding deliveries to Boomplay over similar grievances, but no source this desk fetched and read names Merlin, Universal Music Group or Warner Music Group as having withdrawn their own Boomplay licences in the same window. That specific claim surfaces only in aggregator blog posts that recirculate trade reporting without adding a named source, and it is not repeated here as established fact.

This desk also could not check Boomplay’s platform directly: boomplay.com was not retrievable for this record. That means the status below reflects the most recent trade reporting this desk could verify, not a live inspection of whether Sony’s catalogue is back, partly restored, or still missing. No source found, through the most recent reporting checked, describes a resolution, a settlement or a restoration of Sony’s catalogue to Boomplay.

What this means for artists

If your masters or your distribution sit with Sony Music Entertainment, The Orchard or AWAL, and your catalogue was available on Boomplay, this is the kind of decision that happens above your contract, not inside it. Nothing here required Wizkid’s, Davido’s or Tems’ sign-off, and nothing here changed who owns their masters. It changed where the catalogue was visible to tens of millions of Boomplay users in some of their biggest African markets, over a payment dispute between two corporate counterparties that neither one will discuss.

The practical lesson is about leverage you don’t control. An artist’s recording deal sets who gets paid when a stream happens on Boomplay. It does not set whether Boomplay is paying the label that is supposed to pay the artist, and it does not give the artist standing to find out. When a platform-level royalty dispute escalates into a full catalogue pull, as this one reportedly did, an artist’s visibility on a market-leading African app can disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with the artist, and reappear, if it does, on a timeline nobody with an audience is required to announce. The clearest thing any artist or manager can do with that is ask their own label or distributor, directly, whether Boomplay is current on payments before assuming a platform’s absence from an artist’s catalogue is a technical glitch rather than a corporate standoff.